from the publisher:Body
of Work brings
together for the first time all of Maggie O'Sullivan's solo collections
of poetry and visual texts published before her 1993 Reality
Street book In the House of the Shaman. These booklets,
long out of print, are here presented in facsimile, scanned from
the original publications, or in some cases the original mauscripts,
together with a selection of previously unpublished works.

is adapapted from a longer essay on O'Sullivan
published in the most recent issue ofEcopoetics

Colliderings: O’Sullivan’s
Medleyed Verse

Charles Bernstein

Every poem was once a word.

If culture were an accident, then the job of the poet might
be to write the report rather than rectify the wrong. If culture
were the product of a supreme fiction, then the poet's job might
be to find the authors and clue them into things ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­– not
as they are but as they appear.

Maggie O’Sullivan begins one of her readings by invoking
an “unofficial” word (also the title of one of her
books). In this sense, and perhaps paradoxically, O’Sullivan
is in a main line of British poets, a line that swerves, with
clinamacaronic speed, from Blake to Swinburne, MacDiarmid to
Raworth, Carroll to Bergvall, Cowper to Loy, Kwesi Johnson to
Bunting, Rossetti to Fisher. In their own way, each of these
is an anti-representative poet: one who takes the office of poetry
as the creation of spaces between sanctions; outside, that is,
received categories.

You can't make a poem unless you are willing to break
some verses.

In Roots of Lyric: Primitive Poetry and Modern Poetics,
Andrew Welsh makes the distinction between "song melos" (with
its externally derived regular meter) and "charm melos" (whose
more chaotic sound patterns emerge internally). O’Sullivan’s
poetry is unmistakably charm. In “riverrunning (realizations” (in Palace
of Reptiles), she put it this way: “A Song Said Otherwise,
half sung / half said SINGS”; where “Otherwise” is
also a music that is “Edgewise” [Palace, p.
59], wise to edges and others and also edgy; othering and auditing
rather than authoring.

To half-sing a song is to stutter into poetry and back to
music, your back to the music, part incantation, part pleat. “Stammering
before speech,” O’Sullivan writes in “riverrunning
(realizations” [Palace, p. 60]: not just prior
to but in the face of. The beat is off mark so as
to be on tangent. A stone thrown into a pond (pound, pun) produces
rings of concentric circles around the point of entry. The charm
is to create a rhythm in the counter-current, via the interference
(the event): the shortest distance between two waves is a
sign. This is what O’Sullivan calls “colliderings” [Palace¸ p.
63].

Compared to the magnificent hieratic credo of Bunting, “Take
a chisel to write,” O’Sullivan sounds our poetic
a-anthem of the Unofficial Word:

BEAT, BELLOW me
Cloth /
Shakings
of chisel/
Chounded
all pitches

The shaking chisel (trembling, warbling, stuttering, faltering)
marks a radical shift not just of aesthetic but ethic. The legitimate
aspirations of pitch, not our tent, but our voicings. Chounded:
a collidering of hounded, bounded, & founded with chow, with
chew, what we eat in our mouths, the visceral words of the unofficial
world we make by inhabiting.

O’Sullivan, in a 1990 interview, puts it this way: “… my
work is driven by the spoken, sounded or breathing voice. Particularly
I have always been haunted by issues of VOICELESSNESS—inarticulacy—silence—soundlessness—breathlessness—how
are soundings or voices that are other-than or invisible or dimmed
or marginalized or excluded or without privilege, or locked out,
made Unofficial, reduced by ascendant systems of centrality and
closure, configured or Sounded or given form & potency; how
can I body forth or configure such sounds, such tongues, such
languages, such muteness, such multivocality, such error—& this
is perhaps why the non-vocal in mark & the non-word in sound
or language—make up much of the fabrics & structures
of my own compositions.” [Brown, p. 90]

On October 27, 1993, O’Sullivan performed “To
Our Own Day,” from Kinship with Animals (Book II
of In the House of the Shaman) at SUNY-Buffalo (audio
file available at PennSound: MP3). O’Sullivan called the
poem, “my
favorite of all the pieces I have ever written.” The poem
takes O’Sullivan just over 40 seconds to read. I keep listening
to it in a loop, dozens of times. Each listening brings something
new, something unfamiliar; and the rational part of my ear has
a hard time comprehending how this is possible, how such a short
verbal utterance could be so acoustically saturated in performance.
To be sure, this experience is produced by the performance of
the poem and not (not so much) by the poem’s text, where
fixed comprehension (however illusory) comes sooner.

Each time I listen to “To Our Own Day,” I recall
best the beginning, the first several words. But once the poem
gets underway, I listen anew, almost without recall, the combinations
of unexpectable words create a sensation of newly created, permutating
sense-making at each listening. I keep thinking I will “get
it” (and be finished with it), but I hear different things,
make different associations, each time I listen. This is the
primary condition of “charm” in Welch’s sense.

In the Buffalo performance, the tempo moves from a fairly
quick speech tempo (some space after each word) to a more rapid
song tempo (almost no space between the words) and then ends
with the slightly slower speech tempo. The intonation (pitch)
sounds consistent throughout: as a result there is no change
in the inflection: each word is receiving a just measure of care.
(I mean to relate this to “just intonation” in music,
as well as to chant.)

The circular shift in tempo created a top-like effect, quickly
gaining speed and slowing down slightly at the end. The words
seems to trip on one another, gaining acceleration first through
the echo of the accented vowel sounds and then, near the end,
by a string of intense alliteration. The effect of word modulating
into word is partly the result of the way O’Sullivan extends
the vowels: it is as if a continuous stream of mutating vowels
was punctuated by a counterflow of consonants; as if the consonants
were rocks skimming in the water, surrounded by concentric circles
of rippling vowel sounds.

O’Sullivan’s words lead by ear. Hers is a propulsively
rhythmic verse that refuses regular beat; an always morphing
(morphogenic) exemplum of Henri Meschonnic’s distinction
between the ahistoricity of meter and embodiment of rhythm. But
O’Sullivan’s is less an embodied poetics than a visceral
gesture (“pressed synaptic”): not an idea of the
body made concrete but a seismographic incarnation of language
as organ-response to the minute, shifting interactive sum of
place as tectonic, temporality as temperament, self is as self
does.

“Birth Palette” ( Palace of Reptiles):
In
the beginning was the enunciating; words are the residue of a
hope.
So often O’Sullivan avers syntax for axial iteration, word / ord / wo / rd / drow,
as if Adam grooved on applets and sugarcane, always on the eve
of being able. Naming, here, is an avocation, kissing cousin
of invocation and melody.
This is a poetry not of me/me/me but it/it/it.
Ecopoetics
as echo-poetics.

“Knots, whorls, vortices” – O’Sullivan
quotes this phrase from Tom Lowenstein’s study of the Inuits
[epigraph to “Doubtless” in Palace of Reptiles,
p. 31]; this trinity is emblematic, not of O’Sullivan’s
forms but of her stamp. Which, in turn, suggests the connection
between her project and the intimations of the archaic that infuse
her poems: a cross-sectional boring through time, whirling the
sedimentary layers into knots. The archaic material pushes up
to the surface. Collage and pulverization are at the service
of a rhythmic vortex.

O’Sullivan’s engagement with Joyce, especially
the late work, is both intimate (in-the-sounding) and explicit
(in-the-naming). If Joyce’s words are like refracting,
crystalline black holes, O’Sullivan’s are trampolines.

“Plover bodying”: in flight; “irre-reversible ‘almostness’”:
no more irritable striving after permanence (irreversibility),
the inevitability of the not-quite, the now in neither. “MAPPING
OF LONGINGS / we never arrive at”: Almost is itself
subject to reverse – there, not there; here, not
here. The inebriation of fort/da, the stadium of the “hap-hazard
UNCLENCHINGS”: Fort DaDa.

There is no rhythm without song and yet song codes the acoustic
surfeit that is O’Sullivan’s ore. “Iridesce!”

O’Sullivan’s visceral vernacular (“carnal
thickness”): autochthonous verse, tilling the inter-indigenous
brainscape of the Celtic / Northumbrian / Welsh / Gaelic / Scots
/ Irish / Anglo / Saxon transloco-voco-titillated strabismus.
It’s not that O’Sullivan writes directly “in” any
one of the languages “of these Isles,” but that they
form a foundational “force field” out of which
her own distinctive language emerges, as figure set against its
grounding.

The medleyed consciousness of these sounds, these languages,
is made palpable in O’Sullivan’s poems, which lend
themselves to recitation, while resisting thematization. Her
words spend themselves in performance, turn to gesture, as sounds
wound silhouettes and rhythms imbibe (“re-aspirate”)
incantation.

O’Sullivan cleaves to charm: striating song with the
visceral magic of shorn insistence.

NOTES

An earlier version of this essay was written for The Salt
Companion to Maggie O’Sullivan , edited by Lawrence
Upton (forthcoming) and first published in Ecopoetics 4/5
(2004-2005). This essay was both expanded and excerpted as the
introduction to Body of Work.